Problem World

So much of comics — and I’m thinking the whole industry, not just Marvel/DC — is dedicated to hyper-consumers, you know? It’s all about buying this stuff immediately upon release, amassing these tomes and libraries and archives alongside the weekly installments of whatever genre stuff there is. Nobody can keep anything in print, there’s so few people qualified to cleave the wheat from the chaff. It’s just buy-buy-buy, X-9 hardcovers and 26 volumes of Peanuts and another re-release of Prince Valiant and 16 newly-translated softcovers from wherever [D+Q Publisher Chris] Oliveros went on vacation. I get sick of trying to play the democratic catch-all who gives everything a chance, sick of that feeling where I’m constantly staring off into the next few months, waiting to see what comes next. And it doesn’t do service to the work, either. It just becomes an ingestion process, this thing where you’re constantly shoveling comics into your head like an old school meat grinder. Reading years of work in days, binging on the stuff, and just checking it off and moving onto the next thing… it’s gross.

Shouldn’t there be stuff that I’m re-reading yearly?

So yeah, it’s harder. I don’t know that I have a point here. That question opened up a can of worms I’m struggling with. Comics used to be a part of my life, now they feel like they’re too much of it, and yet the only positive force I find in them is when I read good ones. But getting to that is becoming a situation where the cons — dealing with the scum that publish them, the sub-mental idiots who want to “break in,” the rampant hate so many have for the few genuine artists, the constant assault on integrity and ethics from all sides — sometimes it makes me want to bail out and divorce myself entirely.